So Jason Kottke did something called “research” and looked into the backgrounds of all the scientists at Thursday’s NASA press conference.

This was what he came up with:

So, if I had to guess at what NASA is going to reveal on Thursday, I’d say that they’ve discovered arsenic on Titan and maybe even detected chemical evidence of bacteria utilizing it for photosynthesis (by following the elements).

Then former Wired man and current tech editor at The Atlantic Alexis Madrigal had to go and quash the hopes and dreams of every nerd in America (and the whole world, in fact).

In a media advisory posted earlier today, NASA announced that it will hold the a press conference at 2pm on December 2 “to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” The announcement is likely related to the recent discovery of Oxygen in the atmosphere of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft.

And with wording like that, we can only assume that this is a truly major announcement. If it just turns out to be a dud — some non-announcement announcement — I sincerely hope their press release writers will soon be looking for another job.

This is a small steam engine I made, mainly from bits of junk around my garage, playing a Sex Pistols punk LP. The engine speed is controlled by a throttle being driven from a servo controlled by an Arduino. The RPMs are measured by a coil detecting the passing of six magnets in the edge of the platter and the approximate revs are displayed on an analogue meter. I am using the PID controller library to do the work out how to control the servo based on the input speed. The safety valve is making the whistling noise at the start as steam pressure is built up. A small flick of the platter will start the engine and then the Arduino takes over trying to maintain 33 1/3 RPM. At the end the meths burner runs out of fuel so the steam pressure, and therefore the speed, drops. You can see the Arduino trying to throttle up to maintain the speed right at the end.

For almost six hours on Monday, the infamous Twitter account was suspended because of a “valid impersonation report.” The suspension caused a Twitter uproar and resulted in some speedy changes to the account, said Pauly Casillas, one of the contributors.

Most gamers on Steam are still getting pumped about Portal 2 coming out April 2011. In the above Machinima.com video, a dude breaks down every frame in the E3 Portal 2 trailer. He made some predictions in it that turned out to be correct, including the fact that the red and blue icons indicate a Co-Op mode, which was revealed back in September.

Co-Op mode is not all the good people at Valve have leaked after E3 and Valve’s ARG surrounding Portal 2’s release. If you haven’t already, head over to ThinkwithPortals.com and watch all the great “training videos” that have come, which are all in the game’s wonderfully witty language of course.

Today Twitter officially suspended the @garyjbusey account because they received a “valid impersonation report,” said Pauly Casillas, one of the minds behind the account.

The suspension has stirred up some serious support for the famed account. @YourFavWhiteGuy, @Jesus_M_Christ and @Nick_Nolte are only some of Twitter celebs showing their love for the “patron saint of headbutts.”

Here’s some more of what Casillas had to say about the suspension:

Twitter has said that they will activate the account as long as we change two things: The avatar and the username.
As we have been @GaryJBusey for almost two years and also have tweeted our followers to follow @THEGaryBusey out of respect, it seems as that is not enough. Of course, we will follow Twitter’s demands and comply as soon as we can, but you and I both know who the real Not Gary J Busey is.

Surely the most quotable man since Shakespeare, but don’t call him Shirley: Leslie Nelson has died, but we still have his lines. Here’s a good mash-up of some of his greatest jokes, with one more video in the post. That video? The greatest line ever uttered.

In its first season, Ugly Americans has brought the best out of horror with its satirical premise and violent, dark comedy. It proved to be one of the weirdest shows on television by pitting bearded little wizard men against each other (as show above) and continually punishing protagonist Mark Lilly’s bleeding heart approach to his job as a social worker.

The show vacillates from silly humor to seriously fucked-up scenarios with a lot of blood and gore. As I’ve said before, fantasy, sci-fi and monster flick parodies tend to lighten the mood of Ugly American‘s otherwise abrasive and super-violent humor, which it share with other cartoons from Augenblick Studios such as Superjail!.

So here are a few scenes from this brief, 14-episode glimpse of a world where otherworldly creature are integrating into society instead of hiding from it:

Though we’re big fans of AMC’s The Walking Dead, we’ve had our share of quibbles with some of the shows logical absurdities. Much to our delight, Graham Annable, or grickle on Flickr, has started using his comic skillz to pick apart some of the shows more obvious plot holes and logical head-scratchers. But do not fear! He’s not skewering the show in its entirety.

From his Flickr site:

I hope that this flickr set doesn’t come off as super hateful of the TV series “The Walking Dead”. It’s just that, so far, I’ve been disappointed in a lot of the writing. I think the zombie scenes and efx have been solid but the character development and logic has been killing it for me. My nerdy inclination, of course, is to vent all my issues through a collection of slightly mean-spirited doodles. Enjoy or object. The Walking Dead">